Construction kits and connectors are well known. Such items have employed connectors and additional members having a wide range of shapes and sizes including blocks, pyramids, rods, gears, flat panels, discs and the like. Construction kits have been used to build a respective wide range of very crude to semi-realistic models of structures such as airplanes, trains, cars, rockets, buildings, animals and more.
Known construction kits for constructing semi-realistic models generally require a large number of like-shaped connectors and/or a wide range of uniquely-shaped connectors generally being connectable in only one or a limited number of ways. Such construction kits quickly lose a user's interest due to either the extreme effort required or the limited number of structures that can be made. Moreover, known connectors generally form fixed angle connections, which further limits the type of models that can be built.
Known connectors employ a variety of interconnecting and interlocking means such as holes, bosses, notches, grooves, threads, and joints. Those connectors have also been made from a large variety of materials such as wood, plastic, foam and metal.
One widely available connector is the TAZO™ connector. Such connectors are disc-shaped and are available in a variety of geometric shapes such as a circle, square, pentagon, hexagon and the like. Each TAZO™ has four to eight notches on the outer periphery of the disc. The width of the notches approximates the thickness of a TAZO™ connector. TAZO™ connectors are formed into chains and other structures by detachably and perpendicularly interconnecting their notches so that adjacent TAZO™ connectors are substantially perpendicular to each other. Those construction kits are very limited in the types of models they can form.
By interconnecting a varying number of TAZO™ connectors, some very simple geometric structures, such as a circle, sphere, rod, square, cube triangle, rectangle, block, pyramid and the like, can be formed. However, forming semi-realistic models of complicated structures such as airplanes, buildings, animals, automobiles, ships and spaceships, is almost impossible when employing solely TAZO™ connectors and if accomplished generally results in extremely large models that are not very realistic in appearance.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,179,681 to Matos discloses a universal connector toy that employs a tongue-in-slot mechanism. The construction toy requires that the tongue (or tab) be placed within a slot, an aperture in the disc. While that toy is extremely versatile, it limits the angle of entry/approach of the tongue into the slot. The limitation results in a limitation as to the models that can be built. The '681 patent requires insertion of a tab into a slot and not into a recessed retainer.
There remains a need for a construction kit that can form a wide range of semi-realistic models while requiring a limited number of connectors and providing a greater number of ways in which the connectors can be connected.